


Dreams of Books and Bees

by viridianmasquerade



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Afterlife, Dreambubbles, F/M, Flushed Romance | Matesprits, mostly pretty canon compliant, slight AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-23
Updated: 2015-03-23
Packaged: 2018-03-19 06:10:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,631
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3599325
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/viridianmasquerade/pseuds/viridianmasquerade
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Terezi, freshly arrived in the dreambubbles after her canon death, runs into Sollux and finds out that she was right about him and Rose all along.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dreams of Books and Bees

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Rema (aetherGeologist)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/aetherGeologist/gifts).



Paradox space is a strange place and an even stranger time, and that plus shenanigans to the power of infinity pretty neatly sums up how Sollux Captor came to be dead, blind, and in love with a spooky human wizard girl.

Sure, he's stuck living in a dreambubble, but all in all, being with her again is worth it, even if he is back to being blind, and that's really all there is to say on the matter.

Default snarky attitude aside, he isn’t really in the mood for talking. He’d be happy to leave it at that, but his audience rudely interrupts to tell him that this is a perfectly stupid waste of a totally cool story and he is found immediately guilty of Deprivation of Juicy Details under Section Shut Up And Tell Me What Happened I Only Died An Hour Ago And I Have Clearly Missed Out On A Lot. Exaggerated hand talking appears to be extremely mandatory when sentencing someone under this section.

Sollux suggests that this is probably not a real law. It actually is, or was, because Her Imperious Condescension was a shameless gossip who believed the withholding of scandalous stories was tantamount to treason, although Section Shut Up And Tell Me What Happened is a fabrication. Terezi gets sidetracked explaining all of this to him, until she catches herself with a frown. She wants to hear the story and Sollux is distracting her on purpose.

He sighs. He likes talking to Terezi. They always got along, even before the three long years they all spent on the meteor. It’s just, he explains, he's not the story-telling type at the best of times, and today he really isn’t in the mood; it's Rose who's known for her sesquipedalian loquaciousness. He loads the words with irony, making enclosure talons with his fingers, but it's easy to see he enjoys the way the sounds roll off his tongue so smooth these days, that lisp left behind in another life. It's no big leap to guess that Rose taught him that phrase. It hardly sounds like something Sollux would have said when he was alive. (Alive-alive, as opposed to whatever kind of alive he is now, what with being dead.)

Sollux says that if his esteemed audience (another Rose-ism; Terezi rolls her sightless eyes and sticks her tongue out in delighted disgust) wants to hear more, he tells her, she should go talk to Rose.

She tells it better anyway, he adds, shrugging. All those sesquipedalian words.

* * *

Rose likes Sollux, she likes the way his taciturn manner stands in sharp contrast to his occasional outbursts of manic enthusiasm. She likes his dual-colored glasses, how they clash nastily with the bright orange seer outfit she dryly refers to as her “wizard robes”. The two of them make for strange genre fiction, she muses. One doesn't often see wizards and aliens in the same story, at least not on Earth. She smiles a Trolla Leesah smile and waves a hand dismissively, says, anyhow, in all likelihood, that is the extent of what is available to disclose about the matter which is at hand.

Terezi presses her lips together and glares amiably at Rose, who holds a straight face for an impressively long time before one corner of her mouth creeps upwards into a crooked smile.

I missed you, they tell each other warmly, smiling happily. The strange fey timelessness of the dreambubbles makes death a little softer here, and they are quick to return to the friendly chatter they had learned to love during their time on the meteor. Back then, Terezi had suspected there was something brewing between Sollux and Rose, and she is beyond excited to know she was right: she wants to know all the details right this second, and unlike Sollux, Rose is in the mood to share.

She tells Terezi that she had taken to chatting with Sollux over Pesterchum during SBURB after Kanaya had drifted out of contact. Later, she had discovered that the disconnect was precipitated by Vriska finally coming to reciprocate Kanaya's flushed feelings. Fortunately, by that time, Rose was too deeply fascinated by Sollux to mind very much.

They had little in common except a mutual veneer of aloofness. In fact, their tastes were about as disparate as they could be: computer hacking and grimdark majyyk, prime numbers and elegant words. It hardly seemed to matter. They soon found that they could talk for hours about anything and everything that came to mind. They worked around his wicked mood swings, developing a system without really meaning to.

When he was up, Rose could ask a single well-targeted question and watch him expound on the topic for hours; when he was down, Sollux could do the same to her. Cool and immovable as a glacier, Rose found it easy to weather even the worst of Sollux's mood swings, and her calm resolve helped level him out.

They talked for months, falling slowly in love and not even realizing it.

Sollux was right after all. Rose does tell it better than he would have. Unsociable nerd, Terezi thinks fondly, settling in for a good listen.

* * *

The first time they ever met did not go as either of them had imagined or anticipated. Sollux had opened his eyes to the searing glare of the newly-born Green Sun, finding himself half-ghost. Rose had risen from the dead just moments previous and was still getting used to the idea.

They were in an emotional place, to say the least.

They hadn’t talked in days. Rose had gone radio silent all of a sudden without telling him why. The first thing she did when she saw him floating there in space was apologize for not telling him about the suicide mission, but he was too upset to listen to anything she said. He knew what her blinding robes meant; he knew achieving god tier meant dying first. She’d chosen to go off to her own death and she hadn’t even told him. It was only luck that she’d gone god tier instead of dying for good. It stung, badly, and worse because he was afraid to admit that his anger came from worry, and worry from love.

He knew that his own recent death and semi-resurrection made his anger hypocritical at best. Life and death were blurry concepts in paradox space, and all that should have mattered was that they were there now, together for the first time. Still, he couldn’t bite down his anxiety. Rose, for her part, was a glacier: coldly, immovably angry in response to what she (correctly) saw as a very unfair reaction.

Instead of throwing their arms around each other, they turned away in silence. Even still, when the time came to either stay behind with Aradia or remain on the meteor, he surprised everyone (himself included) by choosing the meteor. Angry as she was on the surface, Rose did not object. In fact, she may even have smiled to herself, though she would never have admitted it.

Nevertheless, it was almost an eternity before they truly talked again.

* * *

The distance between them grew wider by the day, feeding into itself: Rose angrily refused to talk to Sollux, who angrily refused to talk to Rose, who angrily refused to talk to Sollux. Even when their anger faded, each was too proud to make the first move for a very long time.

By the time they were actually willing to let it all go, they had forgotten how to approach each other. Their conversations, which had seemed to flow so naturally on Pesterchum, were stilted and awkward, each of them frantically trying to avoid seeming interested, at the same time desperate for the other to give them some kind of sign.

Terezi smirks triumphantly when she hears this, because it confirms how clever and observant she is. She was not imagining the long, lingering, starry-eyed looks, the small sighs whenever they passed each other in the halls. Rose objects; how can Terezi know there were stars in their eyes if she is blind?

She does not deny their presence, however, so Terezi knows she is right. Terezi likes being right, especially because she always is.

They stumbled politely and awkwardly through the next three years, neither of them willing to take the blow to their pride if the other rebuked them.

And then the meteor landed, followed by a lenghy series of shenanigans which involved Gamzee, the surprisingly-not-dead Troll Empress, and a duo of mind-controlled human girls, all of which finished up with just about everyone dead, including Rose and Sollux. Terezi sighs and drums her feet boredly, knowing that Rose is stretching it out on purpose, just to make her squirm. Terezi was there, after all. In fact, as far as she’s concerned, it was all only an hour ago.

* * *

They woke up beside each other in the desert of the dreambubbles after death, stutter-shook through hello and I’m sorry and I missed you until they gave up trying to talk and just kissed. Being dead, really dead (not just dead-and-revived), made it seem pointless to try to pretend they wanted anything else.

It tasted like every word they’d ever tried to say and failed to. When they finally broke away it felt like the stillness after a forest fire, all the refuse of the last three years burned away, the ground fresh for something new to grow.

Rose dreams libraries full of stories she meant to read, and Sollux dreams about apiculture networks he never hacked, and they tell each other all about them. They spend months dreaming of books and bees, and lose track of time. They can finally talk again, just like they used to, and it is perfect.


End file.
